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Rich Ricci, the chief executive of corporate and investment banking at Barclays, said management was overly optimistic about the global fee pool when it chose to expand the business in the wake of the Lehman Brothers acquisition. But he told Financial News this week that he was committed to new chief executive Antony Jenkins' strategy for the investment bank.

During the bank’s strategy day in London this week, group chief executive Antony Jenkins repeatedly refused to give his backing to Ricci by name, saying only that he had confidence in the entire executive team at Barclays.

But Ricci was clear in an interview with Financial News this week. “I’m not going anywhere and I fully support what Antony is doing,” he said.

The investment bank reported a 13% increase in revenues in 2012, largely driven by a 17% improvement in fixed-income revenues, but the business is a focus of Jenkins’ strategic review.

While the bank’s footprint in both continental Europe and Asia is reducing as Barclays retrenches in those markets, Ricci insisted both regions remain important for the bank. He said: “Europe and Asia are vital for our global franchise. The reason we reduced headcount is the result of the banking fee pool in these regions declining by over a third over the last couple of years. We need to size the business relative to the opportunity that’s available to us.”

The bank said in its strategy presentation that it would reduce 550 front-office staff in equities and the investment bank, resulting in a 15% reduction in front-office full-time employees at managing director or director level.

He pointed out that Barclays was not mounting a wholesale retreat from Asia or Europe and will retain close to a thousand front-office workers in Asia: “We have people on the ground: we’re not closing countries and we’re not going to suitcase those regions from London and the US.”

Ricci said that Barclays was unduly optimistic about the available fee pool when it began building out equities and banking in Europe and Asia in 2009: "We were more optimistic about the opportunity and fee pool when we started to build out equities and banking in Europe and Asia after the Lehman acquisition. We saw the growth story in China and in the rest of Asia. We were hopeful in the early part of 2009 that there might be a macroeconomic recovery globally. In 2010 we hoped things would come back and then again in 2011. We now think this looks more structural than cyclical."

Legacy risk-weighted assets are to be reduced by more than half from £79bn to £36bn by the end of 2015 as the bank seeks to deal with its book of assets that pre-date recent changes to capital rules.

This will be effected in three ways, with some assets rolling off the book naturally as they mature and others being restructured or sold, for example to non-banks more able to own them in a capital-efficient way.

Ricci said: “With those businesses that may not fall foul of Dodd-Frank, we’ll be economically rational about exiting them and in what period but it’s safe to say we’ll be out of them by the end of 2014.

“We’ve done a good job on our credit market exposures, having reduced that portfolio by 80% since 2009, and there are other assets that under the new rules may not be attractive from an RWA perspective.”

Decisions will be based not just on regulatory proscriptions, such as those contained in Dodd-Frank against proprietary trading, but also on the costs of being in certain businesses such as securitised credit and long-dated derivatives. “They get penalised from a capital perspective under Basel III so we’ve stopped doing them or we price them based on the rules,” said Ricci.

“We’re not doing a lot of that at all: it’s the mindset you have to have now, but in terms of market-making we’ll be able to do that under the terms of the clear definitions of Dodd-Frank.”